Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  Although the vacation at Bellagio on Lake Como brought Margaret “into contact with . . . high society, duchesses, marquises and the like,” as she wrote to Cary Sturgis, and the talk was often “of spheres so unlike mine,” Margaret was reminded of nothing so much as the dreams she and Cary had once entertained of an ideal riverside community in Newburyport: “these people have charming villas and gardens on the lake, adorned with fine works of art; they go to see one another in boats; you can be all the time in a boat if you like.” Margaret would later decide that there were few “women in Europe to compare with those of America”; she managed to establish “real intimacy” with only three, Arconati Visconti among them. But at Bellagio, during that summer in which “I seemed to find myself again,” Margaret felt welcomed into an elite company of like-minded women. Arconati Visconti’s friendship circle in exile had included Margaret’s heroine Bettine von Arnim, and she introduced Margaret now to the “fair and brilliant” Polish countess Radzivill, another “one of the emancipated,” Margaret judged. The countess “envies me,” Margaret marveled, for being “so free, so serene, so attractive, so self-possessed!” In her travels Margaret had unknowingly acquired the same poise she admired in the marchioness Arconati Visconti: the ability to project “without any physical beauty . . . all the impression of beauty.” Certainly Giovanni Ossoli thought so—along with the “pretty girls of Bellagio,” daughters of the Italian gentry, who “with their coral necklaces, all brought flowers to ‘the American Countess’ and ‘hoped she would be as happy as she deserved.’” Their “cautious wish” seemed, for the moment, within her grasp.

  If Margaret lost touch with Ossoli—she could not have written to his family residence in Rome without arousing suspicion of an attachment—she traveled with three powerful male epistolary companions: Mickiewicz, Mazzini, and Waldo Emerson. Waldo’s periodic letters to “our queen of discourse,” as he addressed Margaret in sympathy with her struggles in the French language, brought news of a world that must have seemed impossibly distant. Over the winter, Henry Thoreau had read an “account of his housekeeping at Walden” to a receptive audience at the Concord Lyceum, the lecture billed as “Subject—History of Himself.” But despite Waldo’s approval of the manuscript’s “witty wisdom,” the young memoirist was having trouble finding a publisher. A reception at Elizabeth Peabody’s Boston bookroom following Waldo’s own winter lecture, “Eloquence,” had brought out the old Conversations crowd: Anna Ward, Sarah Clarke, Cary Sturgis and her two sisters, Ellen and Anna Hooper, along with William Henry Channing and Theodore Parker. Waldo joked that the gathering seemed “an Egyptian party; on this side of Styx too!” Without Margaret, the affair took on a “melancholy absurdity,” and soon the guests “glided out like so many ghosts.” Cary had teased Waldo that even his lecture “was old!!”

  How could her one-time mentor in the “newness”—a man just forty-three years old—feel so ancient, mummified? Now Margaret had other heroes to compare him to, men who had given up home and country for a cause—to put an end to these “everlasting struggles” to bring freedom to “those who will come after us,” as Mazzini had written to her before she left Paris.

  Waldo wrote Margaret that he’d been invited to deliver a series of lectures in England; he viewed the prospect with alarm, as “one to whom almost every social influence [is] excessive & hurtful.” He would rather they “send me into the mountains for protection,” he admitted. Waldo had toured Europe the year after his first wife’s death and returned to New England convinced that there was little to be learned from “these millennial cities”—London, Paris, Rome—with “their immense accumulations of human works,” so dizzying to the beholder that “nothing but necessity & geometry” remained in retrospect. Yet once he learned that Margaret planned to stay on in Italy, he applauded her decision, understanding her quite different need to “run out of the coop of our bigoted societies . . . and find some members of your own expansive fellowship.” Waldo longed to know, “O Sappho, Sappho, friend of mine”—identifying Margaret with the Greek love-poet at one time exiled in Italy—“the best of your Roman experiences,” wishing he could somehow inhabit her mind, guessing that even the “faithfullest paragraph of your journal” would not reveal them.

  Waldo did not tell Margaret that he had devoted many spare hours during the past year to refining a “rugged” translation he’d made years before of Dante’s Vita Nuova (New Life), the medieval Italian poet’s series of lyrics exploring his transfiguring love for the unreachable Beatrice—an account “almost unique in the literature of sentiment,” in Waldo’s opinion. Margaret had once held the text, among the earliest renderings of the chaste passions of courtly love, sacred herself. Nor did Waldo reveal to Margaret that he privately considered her own journal record that she’d once shown him of just “two of her days,” perhaps covering the long-ago negotiations over the “covenant” of five, so much the equal in pitch and ardency of Dante’s work that he’d labeled the passage “Nuovissima Vita”—newest life. No wonder Waldo longed to read whatever as-yet-unwritten record of the heart Margaret might keep in Rome; possibly he looked forward to further manifestations of her “deep-founded mental connection” with “the Polander,” as he referred to Mickiewicz, the “full and healthy human being” with “intellect and passions in due proportion” whom Margaret had pointedly described in her letter from Paris.

  Yet Margaret knew anyway that Waldo was still absorbed imaginatively, sentimentally, with his own Beatrice—Cary Sturgis—by way of a poem in his recent collection, “Give All to Love”:

  Obey thy heart;

  Friends, kindred, days,

  Estate, good-fame,

  Plans, credit, and the Muse,—

  Nothing refuse.

  The poem began as a hymn to Fourierist “passional attraction,” yet in the end it sounded the notes of the Concord Puritan’s Vita Nuova—

  Cling with life to the maid;

  But when the surprise,

  First vague shadow of surmise

  Flits across her bosom young,

  Of a joy apart from thee,

  Free be she, fancy-free . . .

  Mickiewicz had read the poem too, and he quoted the first line to Margaret in a letter she received at Milan—“give all for love,” Mickiewicz admonished her, “but this love must not be that of . . . schoolboys and German ladies.”

  In Paris, “I saw you, with all your knowledge and your imagination and all your literary reputation, living in bondage worse than that of a servant,” the poet protested. “You have persuaded yourself that all you need is to express your ideas and feelings in books. You existed like a ghost that whispers to the living its plans and desires, no longer able to realize them itself.” He might have been describing Waldo Emerson, Margaret knew, but it was to her that Mickiewicz addressed his appeal: “I tried to make you understand that you should not confine your life to books and reveries. You have pleaded the liberty of woman in a masculine and frank style. Live and act, as you write.”

  Margaret responded that his words were “harsh.” “Do not forget that even in your private life as a woman you have rights to maintain,” Mickiewicz had scolded her. But his return letter stated his case more strongly: “Literature is not the whole life.” Margaret must “try to get this inner life lodged and established in all your body . . . I tried to make you understand the purpose of your existence, to inspire manly sentiments in you. Your mind still does not wish to believe that a new epoch commences and that it has already begun. New for woman too.” It was an argument she could scarcely dismiss; he was building on her own precepts to argue for her emancipation: “The relationships which suit you are those which develop and free your spirit, responding to the legitimate needs of your organism and leaving you free at all times. You are the sole judge of these needs.”

  But how could she act out this “manly” prescription with no money to live on? Maybe a new epoch had commenced, but it had not yet fully arrived. In Paris, Margare
t had discovered that although George Sand was more influential than her male contemporaries Balzac and Dumas, she earned far less for her writings. Waldo Emerson had turned aside Margaret’s request for funds, pleading debt, although his combined real-estate holdings and lecture fees were soon to make him one of the fifty wealthiest men in Massachusetts. Margaret knew full well that he had paid for Bronson Alcott’s tour of England after the demise of the Temple School; now he was sponsoring both Thoreau and Alcott in the construction of a “summerhouse” of Alcott’s own quixotic design. “Tumbledown-Hall,” Waldo called the whimsical bungalow, outfitted with “peristyle gables, dormer windows, &c in the midst of my cornfield.” Waldo’s salvo to Margaret—“we all succeed in your success”—must have rung false in her ears.

  Waldo knew in April what Margaret did not learn until June—that her uncle Abraham had died. Perhaps he assumed, like most who knew the family, that rich, childless Abraham Fuller, with an estate valued at $80,000, would make his fatherless nieces and nephews his chief beneficiaries. But Margaret would be disappointed in this too. The legacies had gone elsewhere, and Abraham had divided the remainder evenly among sixty-two near and distant relations, many of whom had no need for the “legal fraction” they received. Rather than the “ten or even five thousand dollars” she could well have expected, Margaret received less than $1,000, from which Abraham deducted $400 he had grudgingly doled out to her in years past, leaving her with scarcely $200. “My uncle died as he had lived, hard-hearted against me,” Margaret concluded bitterly; “far from aiding, [he] wished to see me fall, because I acted against his opinion . . . and defended my mother against his rude tyranny.” Soon she would grow “sore at being continually congratulated about my uncle’s legacy,” his death making it harder to ask for assistance—loans against the proceeds of a book she was beginning to plan about the independence movement in Italy.

  She had already begun to exploit opportunities to write on the subject for European publications. Mazzini had enlisted her as his American exponent of Italian independence for the People’s Journal, and she drew on the hopeful signs of the summer—Pio Nono had granted Rome and Bologna the right to establish Civic Guards to defend against imperial forces—to draft a short plea and an accompanying poem, published after her return to Rome in the fall.

  Mazzini had stayed behind in London, deciding it was too risky to travel in disguise with Margaret and the Springs into Italy. And after her successful delivery of the packet of letters to his mother in Genoa—which provoked Maria Mazzini Drago’s curiosity as to whether a romantic alliance had been formed between her son and the American journalist—Mazzini had limited his correspondence with Margaret, knowing that his mail would be intercepted and read by Italian authorities. But Mazzini had, like Mickiewicz, made his appeal to Margaret by way of Emerson, in his case warning, in a last letter to her in Paris, against an Emersonian devotion to “the inward man”: “Contemplation! no; there are too many sufferings, too many gross iniquities, too many sacred causes in this world of ours, for us to indulge in contemplation. Life is a march and a battle.” Like Mickiewicz, Mazzini believed a too “inward” life to be dangerous, not to personal liberty, but to the liberty of humankind.

  In her poem “To a Daughter of Italy,” Margaret brought the rhetoric of Woman in the Nineteenth Century to the cause, summoning the figure of the vestal virgin from ancient Rome and calling on her “anew” to “rouse to fervent force the soul of man” in Italy’s fight for a modern republic. She was not satisfied with her “poor text,” Margaret wrote to the journal’s editor, but until she could find a language for the new imperatives slowly forming in her heart and mind, she was left with reciting her customary list of idealized goddesses, among whom Isis alone stood for an earthy fertility:

  Amid the prayers I hourly breathe for thee,

  Most beautiful, most injured Italy!

  None has a deeper root within the heart,

  Than to see woman duly play her part:

  To the advancing hours of this great day

  A morning Star be she, to point the way;

  The Virgin Mother of a blessed birth,

  The Isis of a fair regenerate earth,

  And, where its sons achieve their noblest fame,

  Still, Beatrice be the woman’s name.

  Margaret’s invocation of a vestal virgin consecrated to the republican cause must have pleased Mazzini, who had written to his mother in response to her query about his “American friend”: “Don’t worry! If I were a man to yield and grow soft in the midst of Capuan delights, I would have all possible opportunities to do so: there are at least half a dozen young women, who contend each other the privilege of surrounding me with loving care . . . but I cannot afford to grow soft in the midst of their attentions.” When he’d written to Margaret as she left Paris for Rome, “You do not know how much I esteem and love you,” Mazzini knew he could count on her to understand that the love he expressed was for a comrade—a citizen of the world. If Mickiewicz read the poem, however, he must have thought all his counsel had gone for naught. Waldo Emerson would have hailed his Beatrice.

  Fortunately, the man uppermost in Margaret’s thoughts was none of these. When Margaret returned to Rome in October, would it be to persuade her lover, Giovanni Ossoli, to accept her in the long-preferred role of unapproachable inamorata in a chaste Vita Nuova, or to join him in a “Vita Nuovissima,” in which she claimed at last her “legitimate needs,” her “right” to a “private life as a woman”? Would the Tribune’s “Star” descend to earth? Of one thing Margaret had become certain that summer, as she wrote to her brother Richard, who was suffering over a recent broken engagement: “I feel . . . such a conviction of the need in every human heart for love.” But was love a feeling, or an act?

  “It must be inhaled wholly, with the yielding of the whole heart,” Margaret wrote of Rome to Cary Sturgis. “It is really something transcendent, both spirit and body.” Margaret was describing “those last glorious nights” in the city three months earlier, before she left for the summer, “in which I wandered about amid the old walls and columns or sat by the fountains in the Piazza del Popolo, or by the river.” Rome in the 1840s was still in the early stages of excavation, and access to ruins at the Forum and Colosseum, where “every stone has a voice, every grain of dust seems instinct with spirit from the Past, every step recalls some line, some legend,” was easy. For Margaret, England, Scotland, and France had been “more attractive than I expected,” but Rome “fulfills my hopes; it could not do more, it has been the dream of my life.”

  In her letter to Cary, Margaret omitted mention of her companion, Giovanni Ossoli, but she alluded obliquely to her predicament: those warm spring nights had seemed “worth an age of pain both after and before . . . only one hates pain in Italy.” When Margaret returned in the fall, Giovanni helped her find an apartment on the Corso, this one nearer to the Piazza del Popolo and the entrance to the Borghese gardens at the Pincian Hill, across the busy main thoroughfare from the rooms Goethe had occupied over a half-century before, living under an assumed name to escape his adoring public. She could see his windows from hers, as well as “all the motions of Rome” in the street below, as every important parade or procession took the Corso for its route. With the hundred dollars from home and the prospect of two hundred more from Uncle Abrahame’s estate, she engaged the rooms—“elegantly furnished” and “so neat, more like England than Italy,” she wrote to her mother—for an anticipated six months “of quiet occupation” beginning in October. Anxious for privacy herself, Margaret was pleased to learn that it was the “custom of Rome,” she explained, “to take your apartment and live entirely separately from the family”—so unlike American boarding houses with their communal meals and forced conviviality. Was she hinting to her mother of the step she was about to take?

  In her upstairs rooms at 514 the Corso, Margaret had “my books, my flowers”—freshly cut on her writing table—a sitting room for entertaining gues
ts, and “all the pleasures I most value, so rich and exalting . . . within my reach.” Above her bed she had hung a print of Raphael’s Poesy, the winged beauty with book in one hand and lyre in the other, which filled one of four famous ceiling medallions in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura, where the pope signed decrees of the ecclesiastical court. Margaret had purchased a second copy, which she planned to send to Cary; the much-reproduced engraving by Raimondi depicted the seated muse as an angelic sibyl—the medallion’s motto, numine afflatur (she is inspired by the divine force), was adapted from lines in the Aeneid in which Apollo inspires the Cumaean prophetess to speak—flanked by two putti. But unlike Raphael’s original in the Vatican, the print lacked the solemn stony face of a masculine god peering out from beneath her elbow. The image, which called up her many hours spent translating Virgil in girlhood and featured her personal avatar, the sibyl, expressed the feelings Margaret reported that fall to her brother Richard: “I find myself so happy here alone and free.”

  She was not truly dissembling when she wrote to Waldo Emerson that “I live alone, eat alone, walk alone, and enjoy unspeakably the stillness, after all the rush and excitement of the past year.” She saw almost no “Amerns,” as she dismissively abbreviated her countrymen, who tended to “lose the benefit of being abroad, by herding too much together,” and in any case made up only a small percentage of Rome’s English-speaking tourists, most of whom were British. “I have seen them standing three deep” in the Vatican, Margaret complained, “with Murray [guidebooks] sticking out of each pocket.” “Since I have experienced the different atmosphere of the European mind,” Margaret wrote to another friend, probably William Channing, “and been allied with it, nay, mingled in the bonds of love, I suffer more than ever from that which is peculiarly American or English. I should like to cease from hearing the language for a time.” She was leaving hints again: “I am in a state of unnatural divorce from what I was most allied to.”